Destiny
by Fierceawakening
Summary: Another young Megatron story. The Cybertronian military has long since forgotten its days of glory. But Megatron learns that once they had a culture and society of their own... and promptly reflects on what this means for his own vision.


Commander Megatron stared down at the datapad in his hands. The glyphs glowed red, too bright for him to look at without pain, burning in his vision even when he looked away.

That was good. That was precisely what he wanted. He wanted these words to sear him, to etch themselves so deeply into his mind that he remembered them without trying.

If his old commander could see him now, he might say that Megatron thought those words were key to his salvation. He smirked. The only keys to salvation came from within. The only salvation possible for anyone came from finding a vision and holding to it as fiercely as possible, as though your own spark would gutter out if that vision ever died.

These words didn't give him his vision. They merely gave voice to a vision he'd always held within his mind.

The documents were half history, half philosophy. They were training manuals for the spark rather than the mind. They'd been written long ago by the greatest of Cybertron's warriors. Warriors remembered for their great deeds, their prowess on the battlefield, their conquests of brave, defiant worlds.

But although the warrior castes were these mechs' spiritual descendants, few of Cybertron's fighting force read philosophy these days. They loved the stories of their predecessors, carving swaths of shadow and flame through this and other worlds. But all they wanted were tales of battle to flare through their circuits and ignite their impatient weapons systems. They didn't want the lessons that came from those stories. Much less the lessons that those warriors had actually written down.

The civilians stored writings like these in great, towering libraries that rose to pierce the sky. Megatron had visited them only rarely. Such things were not luxuries that a young commander bent on ensuring his troops were the best of the best had often.

But he had gotten his hands on these, and although these copies belonged to him, he refused to run the risk of losing them, and so worked late into the night committing their contents to his memory banks.

They spoke of a time that few of his kind truly remembered. A time of conquest and of victory, when world after world fell to Cybertron's warriors. A time when their names were spoken with fear and reverence.

The others knew all of that, of course. That was why they liked the legends.

But these writings didn't talk only about great deeds. These were the words of the great ones themselves, explaining what it meant to be great. Revealing why and how they had become the great fist of the Universe.

_That _was what had been lost. His kind still had the drive, the technology, the weaponry, even the brutality to win. But they aimed it at nothing but defeating one another in ever more petty, small-minded contests of rank.

That was necessary, sometimes. Megatron would never have denied that. He himself had spent a few vorns culling those who were not strong enough to be useful from his ranks. He had no use for those who couldn't hold and keep their positions.

But those contests were worthwhile only to cull the weak. They were not, in any way, a matter of purpose. A matter of destiny.

And that was what these books contained. Nothing mystical. Nothing secret. Merely the conviction and passion of those who had, once, believed the Universe rightfully belonged to them.

To claim it, above all else, would take discipline.

Oh, rebelliousness would be inevitable from members of a race of warriors. That didn't matter. What did matter was that, in the end, their sparks kindle to the same fire as the spark of the one who led them. If they had that, everything else would follow as it should.

Then they would need self-discipline of a kind that endless sparring - even fighting their comrades to the death for rank - could never give them. Not until they came to understand that their fights were about more than social position.

Not until they understood that each victory tempered them. That the more they won, the more they deserved.

Until, in the end, the galaxy itself was theirs.

He smirked. It seemed impossible, now. None remembered those old ways. None remembered anything, these days, but the laws of fists and weight, the lessons pressed into them by force as their metal crumpled or as they felt an enemy's plating give way.

In the empty, dull space between wars, the others had settled for tearing one another apart. It was certainly a comforting, familiar, reassuring oblivion. But oblivion at its own hands was not what any race of warriors was built for. They would own the galaxy, someday, because they were meant to.

Perhaps he was the only one to see it, to delve deep within his databanks and dredge up those reminders, buried somewhere in generations of code no one even remembered they were running it any more, of what his kind should have been. Perhaps he was the only one to feel memories that were his but were not his tickle his processor like strange, electrifying static.

Or perhaps he was one of many who found themselves slowly awakening, their optics flickering to sudden and new life as they perused old datapads or stood alone on hilltops or stayed behind in the still hours after sparring when everyone else was recharging.

Either way, it didn't matter. His hands clenched around the sides of the datapad, denting the metal, making the glyphs on the screen flare and dance like they'd caught flame.

They would rise, and he would be their driving force. He did not have such power now, but he would seize it in time. Anyone who stood in his way would fall. And that would not be the purposeless cannibalism that had brought them to this. That would be clean. That would be discipline in the service of a vision that would lay worlds at their feet - and at his.

Yes, he would be the one. For other reason than that he had chosen to be.

He lifted his head, not looking at the datapad as he felt it crumple, its screen cracking as his hands tightened around it. Shards of glass dug into the plating of his fingertips.

He welcomed the pain. Nothing could ever be reborn without it.

He would remake worlds themselves, and his kind would be remade along with them. This flame would scour planets, remaking them, burning away what did not deserve to thrive. Nothing - anywhere - would be left untouched, because nothing would stand against them.

Not any more. Not ever. Once they rose, there was no part of the universe that would not belong to them. To him.

He stood, his optics flaring, and dropped the twisted ruin of metal and glass in his hands. Parts of it flickered red, the light of dying embers.

It did not matter. He stepped over the discarded piece of scrap and walked out, the spark tucked within his chest flaring with new heat and light.


End file.
